


Variations

by aboxthecolourofheartache



Series: Machineries in Fire [1]
Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee, 琅琊榜 | Nirvana in Fire (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Incorporeality, Undead, purely self-indulgent Machineries of Empire AU, rated teen for cussing, the servitors have adopted Fei Liu, vaguest possible reference to a panic attack, what kind of trigger is the Black Cradle?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 16:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14548740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aboxthecolourofheartache/pseuds/aboxthecolourofheartache
Summary: Lin Shu and Lin Chen bicker about signifiers, Fei Liu is prince of the servitors, and Langya Hall is a research outpost.The result of my recent Machineries of Empire kick colliding with the current Nirvana in Fire obsession.  Many thanks toshuosjokeon tumblr for the perfect concept of Fledge Null Fei Liu and servitors, and toExtraPenguinfor putting the idea in my head in the first place.  This may or may not be a one-off.  We'll see how things pan out.  Still can't title things.  (My weakness for Lin Chen's debatable depth of personality continues, please forgive me.)





	Variations

“Three up and five over, Fei Liu,” Lin Shu instructed. The boy obligingly moved the game piece to the designated position, leaving sticky finger marks on the board. Lin Shu would sigh if he had lungs to sigh with, a drawback of being a revenant if there ever was one. “Wipe your hands, please- on a napkin!”  


Fei Liu halted in the action of ruining yet another shirt, glared at the approximate space where Lin Shu’s portal would be, and scrubbed at his hands with a napkin.  


Lin Chen floated past the gameboard on his way between instruments, glancing over the formations. He flicked one of Lin Shu’s stones off the board and replaced it with his own. The stone skittered across the floor, chased by a long-suffering servitor. All of Lin Chen’s servitors were birdforms, except the handful he maintained for heavier work.  


“Thank you,” he said to the birdform as it returned the stone to the table, poking its approximation of a head affectionately. “Stop letting me win,” he said to Lin Shu.  


“It’s more entertaining than beating you,” replied Lin Shu. “I actually have to think this way. Your game skills are mediocre for a Nirai.”  


“Your fixation on games is absurd in a Liozh,” Lin Chen quipped back. “This is diagnostic as much as it’s entertainment, Lin Shu. If you throw every game, you’re going to throw your readings.”  


“If I weren’t throwing every game, you wouldn’t have time to take readings,” muttered Lin Shu. This was not entirely true. Playing against Lin Chen was sometimes a challenge, if only because the man had an infuriating habit of casually exploiting loopholes in the mathematics of the games, a very un-Nirai-like trait.  


Lin Chen did not dignify the comment with a response. He seated himself cross-legged beside a maintenance panel and began to manually calibrate a fiddly assortment of blinking dials. The birdform servitor watched from a respectful but interested distance. Whatever else Lin Chen was, he was chillingly competent. Most technicians relied on their servitors for fine-tuning like this. He only asked for their assistance when human fingers would not be precise or steady enough.  


Langya Outpost orbited a picturesque little moon at the ass-end of nowhere in the Jianghu March. It wasn’t complete exile, but it was close. (Lin Shu often wondered what a Nirai had to do to be banished rather than exterminated. Lin Chen’s brand of individualist mathematic artistry was as good as a target on his back. Someone, somewhere, must be holding him in reserve for something.) The view out of the windows might be breathtaking, but the relative position of the outpost to civilized space could make a lesser man weep. Nirai Lin Chen thrived. He reigned over a contingent of strangely devoted technicians and servitors. Despite the isolation, the man was uncomfortably well-informed about the happenings outside his march.  


Their fathers had been friends.  


Because of this paternal attachment, Lin Chen had rescued Lin Shu from the wracked remains of his pulverized army in the wake of the Liozh catastrophe. Plum Ridge Fortress was a radioactive hellhole of overlapping, lingering exotic effects at the time of Lin Shu’s extraction. Lin Shu did not ask Lin Chen how he managed to get in and get both of them out, and he did not want to know. Even as a disembodied sentience, the thought of his Kel, his Fiery Feathers Troop, going up in flames the way all good Kel secretly yearned to die, blindsided him with agonized grief.  


They might have been Suicide Hawks, but they were under his command.  


Lin Shu lost his body, but his soldiers lost their lives.  


“-Marshal, snap out of it! You’re fucking up the last six hours of my work!” Lin Chen’s voice finally reached Lin Shu. “Please stop screaming. You’ve frightened Fei Liu.”  


Fei Liu hunkered under the game table, rocking back and forth with his hands over his ears. Four birdforms and a deltaform servitor huddled around him, their mechanical whirring pitched to comfort, the patterned blink of lights a soothing flow of pale pinks and soft greens. The stone-fetching birdform chirred and beeped gently, wrapped in Fei Liu’s arms like a security toy.  


Lin Chen could have muted Lin Shu. Might have shunted him back into the nerve-scraping _absence_ of the cradle. Instead, Lin Chen chose to shout down a ghost rather than exercise direct control. The Nirai folded back his sleeves so his hands were clearly in view and walked to Fei Liu’s hiding place. He knelt, offered a hand.  


“Fei Liu, he’s back. You haven’t done anything wrong.”  


“I’m… I’m sorry, Fei Liu,” Lin Shu managed. “It’s alright, fledge.” Without a body, he could not reassure the boy with Kel body language, but faction jargon helped. Years of service with the Kel seemed worth the horrors of war to know how to talk to this child. “I am not displeased with you. I haven’t left you to serve alone.”  


Servitors moved out of the way to allow Fei Liu to emerge from under the table. His commanding officer's reassurances blotted out the recent distress. The noise was gone. He was not a Kel alone, floundering like a featherless chick, panicked by the collapse of his link to the only nearby superior officer.  


Fei Liu clung to Lin Chen. Lin Chen awkwardly smoothed the child’s hair. He knew he was a stand-in for the actual person Fei Liu wanted, and a poor substitute at that, but he tried nonetheless. The sooner Lin Shu’s clone was ready, the better.  


“Fledge, thank you for being my hands today.” Lin Shu addressed the boy steadily.  


Fei Liu disentangled himself from Lin Chen and stood to attention, eyes fixed on Lin Shu’s portal. He still wouldn’t talk. Almost eight months without a word, though Lin Chen said the silence was self-imposed. Lin Shu was sure that if he ordered the boy to speak, Fei Liu would speak, but nothing in the universe would make him give that command.  


“I have matters to discuss with Nirai Lin Chen. You are dismissed for recreation for the remainder of the cycle. I expect your prompt return to duty at the morning chimes.”  


Fei Liu performed a heartbreakingly perfect salute.  


“Dismissed, fledge.”  


The boy scampered out of the room, the deltaform servitor coasting anxiously in his wake.  


Revenant and Nirai watched him go, one with eyes, the other doing his best not to think about how vision worked for an untethered consciousness.  


“Well,” said Lin Chen, loading the single syllable with more latent meaning than Lin Shu thought was entirely fair. Lin Chen nibbled a hangnail and then began to search for his stylus. It was stuck in his hair, but Lin Shu didn’t deign to help.  


“I was thinking,” said Lin Chen, lifting a stack of hopelessly old-fashioned drafting papers in fruitless hunt for the stylus.  


“A first,” said Lin Shu.  


Lin Chen flicked his gaze to the portal with a sour, flat stare. “Low-hanging fruit.”  


Lin Shu wished he had shoulders to shrug, but Lin Chen seemed to read the gesture anyway. He responded with a rude one of his own.  


“As I was saying,” said Lin Chen. “Before you started howling and rolling back six hours of tuning, I wanted to suggest that you pick a signifier for stabilization effects.”  


“I have a signifier,” said Lin Shu, realizing as he said it what a stupid thing it was to mention.  


“You _had_ a signifier. You’re a revenant. You don’t sleep and the Rahal can’t scry you. Anyway, walking around with a Mirrorweb Starward Reaching is suicidal at best and grossly egotistical at worst.” Lin Chen scratched his head, discovering the stylus with a ‘ha!’ of delight.  


Lin Shu mulled this over. “I can choose anything? Will the stabilizing effect vary depending on my choice?”  


Lin Chen shrugged. “Who the fuck knows?” His gaze unfocused slightly. “Kujen knows,” he grumbled to himself, so quiet that Lin Shu almost missed it. He’d mentioned the name in passing a few times. Whoever Kujen was, Lin Chen regarded him with a mixture of violent dislike and starstruck admiration. It was unsettling. 

“I’ve never done this before, but I could do the equations in my sleep.”  


“How reassuring.” Lin Shu felt like a traitor, giving up his Mirrorweb, but Lin Chen was right. He would be purged the instant he made himself known. He was an illegal intelligence and a doctrinal fugitive.  


“But yes, I can give you anything you like, though I suggest you assume a faction you can live with without having any telling Liozh-esque moral conniptions. We can pick at the nuances of the form until it’s right.”  


Lin Shu was quiet.  


Lin Chen let him think in peace, fussing with filters on the grid readouts.  


“Lin Chen, what’s your signifier?” Lin Shu asked the question aloud, surprising himself. It wasn’t taboo to ask, but it was personal outside of an intimate or professional relationship which hinged on compatibility.  


The Nirai replied absently without looking around. “Voidmoth Eyes in Fractals. In Nirai-speak, it means I’m distractible and a pain in the ass for group research.”  


Something about the word ‘eyes’ caught Lin Shu’s attention. If he had eyes of his own, he would narrow them. “...and what’s your variant?”  


Lin Chen turned around in his chair to face Lin Shu’s portal, smiling like a fox.  


“Oh fuck you!” Lin Shu wanted hands so he could throw them in the air in exasperation. A variant signifier was rare enough. A variant outside one’s dominant faction was absurd. No wonder Lin Chen was kept in exile rather than eliminated.  


“Please, no need to be jealous,” said Lin Chen loftily. “As if you weren’t guessing from the outset. I could give you a variant yourself, you know. They’re handy.”  


“I’m sure they are,” Lin Shu growled. “You might as well tell me, since you’re so smug about it.”  


“There’s no sport in that,” chided Lin Chen. “And it will give you something to think about when you’re bored.” Here ‘bored’ was code for ‘trying not to go mad in the cradle when isolation was necessary for progress.’ Lin Shu conceded the point.  


“Whatever. What do you think of Kniferose Frostbitten?” asked Lin Shu.  


“Andan? Not my first guess for your preferences, but I can see the appeal. ‘Frostbitten’ is a little on the nose, though, don’t you think? What are you going to do, start calling yourself ‘Mei Changsu?’”  


Miffed silence from the portal.  


Lin Chen sunk his head in his hands. “Oh, for the love of fox and hound…”

**Author's Note:**

> Lin Chen's variant signifier is Ninefox Leaping.
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://aboxthecolourofheartache.tumblr.com/) if you'd like to talk Machineries of Empire (or whatever else)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Machineries in Fire by aboxthecolourofheartache [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17192180) by [Rhea314 (Rhea)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/pseuds/Rhea314)




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